Whole Platform

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Today, we are pleased to announce that a new milestone release of the Whole Language Workbench is publicly available.The Eclipse IDE 4.4.1 is bundled with the all-in-one product distribution. Older versions of Eclipse are no longer supported.Beside the usual fixes and minor improvements, the release includes:

A complete refactoring of the test suite to support continuous testing.

The bundled Java language now conforms to the Java Language Specification 8.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

In the past 10 years my primary computer has been a laptop coupled with a large display, whenever possible.
This summer I switched back to a compact and stylish desktop computer: the Apple Mac Pro.
My love for large screens has grown and the desire to rediscover the tactile feelings of my iPad has driven my choice to a 32" Ultra-HD multitouch monitor: the Sharp PN-K322 BH.
My need to work out of the office for extended periods of time has been reduced, but I want to work as if I were in my office otherwise the creativity is blurred by frustration. So I bought a custom NSP flight case.

After a month of work on vacation in a country house with my family, I can say to be very pleased of my new 4 wheeled portable workstation.

Friday, August 8, 2014

Today, we are pleased to announce that a new milestone release of the Whole Language Workbench is publicly available.The Eclipse IDE 4.4 is bundled with the all-in-one product distribution. Older versions of Eclipse are no longer supported.We completed the separation of the Language Workbench and of the Language Development Kit products from the Whole Platform SDK in order to facilitate the definition of new products.To enable the definition of e4 based products that take full advantage of the graphical notations supported by the Whole Platform we replaced the official Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) with a fork made by Enrico Persiani.The GEF E4 Friendly basically factorize all the e4 compatible code in an additional bundle and can be used effortlessly in place of the official project. Furthermore, if you reduce your dependencies from GEF to just the new bundle, you get e4 only graphical editors in a matter of minutes.As usual, both binaries and source code are available:

Friday, March 21, 2014

Following the official release of Java 8, we are pleased to announce that an updated milestone release of the Whole Language Workbench is publicly available.The Eclipse IDE 4.3.2 with the feature patch to support Java 8 is bundled with the all-in-one product distribution.The Java 8 represents a big step forward for the Java community and we want to be able to take full advantage of its features; so we decided to make Java 8 the required execution environment for the Whole Language Workbench.A few years ago, following the release of Java 5 we redesigned the Whole Platform to adopt generics. For more than a year, we introduced a few workarounds in our code in order to be able to compile with both the official Java compiler and the one bundled with Eclipse JDT. Yesterday, we had to perform a few code changes, just to be able to rebuild our platform with Java 8 instead of Java 7. I am not able to tell you how much of them are due to changes in the Language specification; but the two compilers have reported a small different set of errors.

The news is that even if the history had to repeat itself, we encourage you to start using Java 8 today and we join in thanking both Oracle and the Eclipse Foundation for the great job they have already done.

Friday, March 14, 2014

Today, we are pleased to announce that the new milestone release of the Whole Language Workbench is publicly available.The Eclipse IDE 4.3.2 is bundled with the all-in-one product distribution.This is the first major release based on the e4 platform; all the code needed to run on older versions of Eclipse has been removed and is no longer supported.We completed the factorization of the e4 compatibility layer to enable full e4 product generation. This facilitate the creation of e4RCP applications that leverage the Whole Platform, including the language workbench itself as soon as the dependent plugins will be migrated to e4.

We have bundled two new web related DSLs: JSON and HTML5 each having a specific persistence backed by an external library (Jackson and Validator.nu respectively).New and exciting features are awaiting to surprise you at the Language Workbench Challence 2014 don't miss the dates.

Friday, November 29, 2013

Today, we are pleased to announce that the new milestone release of the Whole Language Workbench is publicly available.The Eclipse IDE 4.3.1 is bundled with the all-in-one product distribution.The major feature of this release is an e4 based version of the IDE integration code. It is an almost complete rewrite of the code to take advantage of all of the new APIs and features of the e4 platform.The "e3" version of the IDE integration code is still in place, so it is possible to use the update site to install the Whole Language Workbench into an existing Eclipse 3.x. In fact, this release is intended to be the last one supporting Eclipse 3.x.As usual, both binaries and source code are available:

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Last saturday I had the opportunity to try a Wacom Cintiq 24HD Touch attached to a Mac Mini and I discovered that it is much more powerful than is advertised.
The multi-touch functionality makes it possible to interact with the operating system and all of the installed applications by using (at least) the same standard gestures supported by the Apple Magic Trackpad.

So, after the installation of the last publicly released version, I played with the Whole Platform for at least two hours using only multi-touch gestures and a wireless keyboard (no trackpad).

As you can easily guess, the Whole Platform is somewhat "touch ready" thanks to its extensive use of graphical notations, drag and drop, and context menus.
By using a 24" display many constructs are already large enough to be selected by a tap or targeted by a drop. Otherwise you have to pinch to zoom the area before performing the desired action.

It was a very amazing experience even for me to discover that modeling the structure, behavior and tooling of a language is already more pleasant and more effective on a tablet-like configuration!